Kiddie Porn in the Blockchain

I've been thinking about what the successor to the web might look like, and I'm super
excited by the possibilities of distributed filesystems, but I've wondered about the
possibilities of denial of service attacks based in inserting illegal content, like child
pornography, into such systems: If someone can convince you to browse to a link containing
that content, it's then instantiated in your local copy and... issues, even more than
ending up with something like that in your browser cache (which can also be done with
images that aren't visible in the final web page) follow.

“Our analysis shows that certain content, eg, illegal pornography, can render
the mere possession of a blockchain illegal,” the researchers wrote. “Although court
rulings do not yet exist, legislative texts from countries such as Germany, the UK, or the
USA suggest that illegal content such as [child abuse imagery] can make the blockchain
illegal to possess for all users.”

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